Oblomovka

2004-11-03»

My memory of the election: milling around the aisle of the Houston-San Jose flight, waiting to step off into the dark. After all that time in the air, the captain announces: "Bush is winning". General mutter of groans from the strangers around me. And distantly, from first class, a little patter of cheers.

2004-11-02»

I've been spending the last few days in Florida, which is currently battened down under Hurricane Crucial Swing State. It's hard to convey quite what it is like here. Campaign ads appear more often than Proctor & Gamble ads on the radio. Everyone's house has a fistful of spoo-oo-ooky negative campaign leaflets that come through every door, every day. Friends start phone call with pitch-perfect imitations of the automated phone solitations: "Hello, Danny, I'm calling you about your voting intentions this Tuesday". My friend's answerphone is filled at the end of the day with messages from Al Gore, George Bush, Theresa Heinz, Barbara Bush...

That's the local colour I was expecting; it's what all the news reports will start their slice-of-life "portraits of a state under sieges" pieces with. What I wasn't expecting was the oddity of being in a real 50/50 state.

I played around with Fundrace.org before I came out here, and was a bit surprised by how incredibly Democratic my neighbourhood back home in Californai was. As in, Kucinich/Dean democrat. I suppose that just checking the election results would have told me what a hotbed of communist sympathisers downtown is. Nonetheless, you do rather assume some diversity in your neighbours; that your idiot neighbour three blocks down must be of an opposing political opinion to you, even if he's too cowardly to say so with a garden sign. With a bloody car like that, he's got to be on the other side, right? Nope. Maybe he's a Liebermann fan or something.

Here, you see Bush and Gore bumper stickers sit uncomfortably close to each other in carlots; neighbourhoods front yards flicker between the two. Churches are quietly split; political conversations sway nervously from left foot to right foot, as everyone tries to keep balance.

I haven't learnt anything about what will happen here. Standing in the interzone doesn't mean you know the shape of the edges of the territory. There's a part of me that, electoral college or not, thinks it's good to have some kind of hothouse, some kind of ground zero, somewhere in the process. It feels viscerally close here.

Not that anyone in this country needs to move to Florida to feel that. I've felt sick with a dread of this election since the beginnings of the Iraq war. The whole country has been pulling at its collar and chomping down antacid for weeks.

And for good or for bad, I'm going to float up and away from it all. I'm catching the flight at 3PM Florida time (-0500) tomorrow, and landing in California by nine Pacific Time (-0800). If it's going to be decided tomorrow at all, I'm thinking it be decided between those two times. I'll be in radio silence. No drinking games, no state by state plays, no screaming at CNN, no cellphone trees.

I shall watch 1776, read "Alternate Presidents", and look out the window on the breadth of America, right coast to left coast, until we all land, hopefully in one piece.

Have a good trip.

2004-10-14»

The important thing about being in a self-contained bubble (or circle jerk) of people who are otherwise unrepresentative of the world of the whole, is knowing that you're in a bubble, and trying to find out the approximate shape of that bubble. Everybody is in a bubble of some sort, and I often think the ones who are the most sneering about other people's parochialism demonstrate the most ignorance, by assuming they speak for everyone.

And I think I speak for everyone when I say that.

What prompted this was a look through some of my old notes on things to blog. They're so old as to be mostly incomprehensible, but the ones that do still ring true look to have some permanent worth to them. One of them was my first note about this:

JWZ has pretty much ascertained that almost everybody can now cope with HTML mail. I always use HTML mail as my own personal reminder of how small a bubble I live within. Almost every mail I get that I read is text-only. HTML mail for me is a freakish exception. That's the exact opposite of the majority experience. Mail for all intents and purposes these days is HTML.

I worry a little that my Bayesian spam filters are slowly coming to the conclusion that I must never ever be allowed to see HTML mail - even if it's from my sister and the message is "Would you like some of this 80 million pounds I just won in the Lottery?". Actually, that does sounds like spam. Bad example.)

Note that this has nothing to do with whether mail should be in HTML. If you think it shouldn't, you're probably part of my bubble, which is large -- certainly so large that I can't see its end horizon, although I know that it's not very large compared to the rest of the online world, and tiny and irrelevant compared to the global population.

2004-10-06»

The Wired News piece on Marshall Beddoe's work with bioinformatic algorithms to crack protocol reverse-engineering has had some good results, in the sense that it's shedding a bit more light on possible crossovers between bioinf and Net applications. (I've written about this sort of genetic cyborg weird-ass mutie crossrbreeding before, for New Scientist).

In the discussion I had with Marshall about his next steps, he commented that a lot of his future work had less to do with number-crunching, and more to do with visualisation. One bioinfodesign innovation that got pointed out to him as a result of the article was sequence logos.

Sequence logos are graphics used in bioinformatics to visually highlight commonalities between multiple sequences. The rows shows how often letters in a gene sequence occur at each position (the GATCs - the taller the letter, the more often the nucleotide appears) together with a measure of how much commonality is preserved over all the sequences (the curve).

If you're trying to spot patterns in long data sequences, some adaptation of this might be useful to you too. I'm really interested in seeing what Marshall comes up with next.